Traditionally, when designing a method of manufacturing an article, a designer would first create a drawing of the item to be manufactured. The drawing would either be a three-dimensional drawing or a set of drawings consisting of top, side, and front views. Computer aided drafting (CAD) is often used to create the drawing. Once the design is created, the engineering group would take over and machining instructions or manufacturing instructions would be added to the design. If necessary, the design would be altered in order to make the design manufacturable. Unfortunately, this results in significant time-wasting, significant inefficiencies in manufacturing processes, and occasionally overall design forfeiture for failure to create a manufacturable design.
Viewed in more detail, conventionally, once the engineer receives the design from a designer, the engineer must interpret the design and then he or she uses his or her knowledge and design information to engineer the design. Previously, when a design is presented to an engineer in any form, (i.e. sketch, verbal description, drawing, computer file, etc.) the engineer must use his or her skills and talents to translate the design into a feasible manufacturing concept. This is usually an iterative process. The translation of a design into an engineered concept relies heavily on the mental skills and intuition of the engineer translating the design. For example, a person can identify what screw is appropriate for a given situation based on a combination of their knowledge, tools and intuition. This is extended to how many screws are needed as well. They could ask the designer what the purpose of a shelf is, then with this knowledge, determine how to support this shelf based on the designer's requirements. However, if the skill or knowledge of the engineer is at all lacking, the result may be a poorly engineered product. In some cases, the designer and engineer is the same person but the process is largely the same even if the task of converting a design to reality happens simultaneously.
There have been many tools developed, such as a calculator or computer configured with software, to aid in this process, but the method generally remains the same. Significantly, the calculations are made to verify the engineer's assumptions rather than to engineer the design. Prior to the present invention, a person generally reviewed and analyzed each scenario to determine how a product should be made. Typically, this engineering process and its associated costs are amortized over the life of the engineered product and are minimal as a function of its cost. However, when a product is only going to be provided once or in limited numbers, the engineering time and cost can be a significant part of the overall cost of the product and time to manufacture.
When forming a custom designed product, as with a new product, each individual component must be engineered and costs of labor and engineering of the design increase significantly due to the inability of a manufacturer to amortize costs. This is driven to different levels depending on the situation. In one example, an architect's prints and drawings of a kitchen layout for a house is engineered by the cabinet maker that manufactures them. If a customized kitchen is desired, a skilled shop person directly interprets the drawings and executes the detailed manufacturing process by manually calculating in their head. Other times the cabinet maker may have stored their knowledge in software that outputs the information required to build the cabinets. This information can be stored in the form of a spreadsheet or database. Another common form is software designed for detailing cabinets. The software, by combining user input and programmatic instructions created by the developer, outputs the information that is used by the cabinetmaker. In any of the programmatic examples, all engineering must be done before the system can be used for design. This is an unnatural constraint of many systems. The natural process is to have a concept, design the concept, engineer the concept, and manufacture the concept. This is the most natural product development.
In order to accommodate a flexible product scheme and allow customization by the customer, all of the engineering information must be defined and the relevant characteristics exposed in order for the producer to recognize what is being ordered. As the product mix increases, the amount of information required to support this grows at an exponential rate. Therefore, the task of managing this data/information grows as well, placing a burden on the infrastructure supporting the process. The typical “fix” has been to reinforce this infrastructure. This has led to diminished returns as the cycle between the customer's order and shipment are decreased. In many cases, the engineering process internally remains longer than the actual internal manufacturing process. Much of the data mushroom is related to the expression of each product in its unique state and a requirement to store this information for referral later. Even systems specifically designed to reduce this expression use rules and knowledge of a relatively low level and still require large amounts of information to be defined, consuming many man-hours before they are even usable.
The present invention method is designed to minimize the amount of information required to engineer an assembly and to store this information so it can be automatically and intelligently applied to multiple and/or different designs, thereby placing design ahead of engineering in the hierarchy and allowing for manufacturing optimizations and end user designing of custom assemblies of any product. It can also be used to guide designers in the process of designing, if so desired. It will abstract a rule or method to its highest practical point of definition, thus increasing the reusability without further definition.